Compare · Updated August 2026
Zyte alternatives: 11 web scraping APIs compared, and where the Zyte API still wins
The short answer
Zyte is the commercial company behind Scrapy, and the Zyte API bundles proxy unblocking, browser rendering and AI extraction behind one endpoint that bills per successful request. Teams look for a Zyte alternative for two reasons: the per-request price depends on which of five difficulty tiers your target sites fall into, so the monthly bill is hard to forecast before you run the crawl, and automatic extraction is built around a fixed list of page types rather than a schema you declare. ClawEngine crawls from a seed URL, renders each page and fills your own schema in one call, on flat plans from $39 a month. Zyte keeps a real advantage on heavily defended sites, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Zyte is not a startup and it should not be judged like one. The company was Scrapinghub before it was Zyte, it created Scrapy and still maintains it, and it has been running crawls for enterprise customers for well over a decade. That history shows up in the product. Zyte API is one endpoint that picks between datacenter and residential proxies, decides whether a page needs a browser, retries what fails, and bills you only for responses that succeeded. Rate-limited requests cost nothing. Standard plans get 3,000 requests per minute. On a site that fights back, this is a serious piece of infrastructure and there is no honest version of this page that says otherwise.
What sends teams looking is usually not reliability. It is two other things. The first is forecasting: Zyte prices every request by which of five difficulty tiers the target site sits in, separately for HTTP and browser requests, so the same 100,000 pages can cost wildly different amounts depending on where you point the crawler. That is arguably the fairest way to price unblocking, and it is still hard to put in a budget before you have run the crawl. The second is the shape of the output. Automatic extraction is excellent on the page types Zyte models, and awkward the moment your target is not one of them. ClawEngine takes the opposite trade: flat monthly plans sized by page volume, and a schema you declare yourself that gets filled from the rendered page in the same call that crawled it. We work on public, permitted pages only, we respect robots.txt, site Terms of Service and crawl-delay, and we do not defeat anti-bot systems. If your crawl depends on getting past active blocking, Zyte is the better purchase and you should make it.
Crawl · render JS · extract typed fields · robots.txt respected
Hit Extract to turn this page into clean, LLM-ready data.
robots.txt respected · public data only
Zyte is the stronger choice when your targets actively block crawlers and you need proxy and unblocking depth behind a Python spider stack, while ClawEngine is the better fit when your targets are public and permitted and you want a forecastable monthly bill with typed fields you defined yourself.
All the options
11 Zyte alternatives, compared
Published US list prices, checked in August 2026. We include ourselves, and we say where each tool beats us.
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| Alternative | Starts at | Free tier | Output | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ClawEngine | $39/mo | No free plan | Clean markdown or typed JSON | Teams that want one compliance-first pipeline returning LLM-ready data for RAG and agents |
| Firecrawl | $16/mo | Yes, 1,000 credits | Clean markdown, plus structured extraction | Fast site-to-markdown for LLM workflows, and teams that want the option to self-host |
| Bright Data | Usage-based | Trial credits | JSON and datasets, not markdown-first | Enterprise-scale proxy networks and prebuilt datasets for hard, heavily defended targets |
| Apify | $29/mo | Yes, $5 credits | JSON, CSV and dataset exports | Teams that want a prebuilt scraper for a specific site rather than building one |
| ScrapingBee | $49/mo | 1,000 free API calls | Raw HTML, with some extraction rules | Simple proxy plus JavaScript rendering behind a clean REST API |
| ScraperAPI | $49/mo | Trial credits | Raw HTML, with structured endpoints for some sites | High-volume proxy rotation at a low cost per request |
| ZenRows | $16/mo | Yes, 5,000 credits | HTML, with markdown and parsing options | Sites behind aggressive anti-bot systems |
| Oxylabs | $49/mo | Trial, up to 2,000 results | HTML, JSON via parsers, and markdown | Enterprises pulling high volumes from hard, well-known targets like major marketplaces |
| Crawl4AI | Free, open source | Yes, fully open source | Markdown, Fit Markdown, or JSON for embedding | Engineering teams happy to run and maintain the infrastructure themselves |
| Diffbot | $299/mo | Yes, 10,000 credits a month | Structured JSON entities, plus a Knowledge Graph | Enterprises that need web-wide entity intelligence and rule-less extraction across many different site layouts |
| ScrapeGraphAI | $20/mo | Yes, 500 credits | Structured JSON from a natural-language prompt or schema, plus markdown | Teams that want LLM-driven extraction from a plain-English prompt, or an MIT-licensed Python library they can run themselves |
ClawEngine
Hobby $39, Startup $99, Scale $399, Enterprise customWhere it wins. Crawl, JavaScript rendering and typed schema extraction happen in a single API call, and robots.txt plus site Terms of Service are respected by default.
What to watch. There is no free plan, so it is priced for teams running real pipelines rather than one-off experiments.
Firecrawl
Free 1,000 credits, Hobby $16 (5k credits), Standard $83 (100k), Growth $333 (500k), Scale $599 (1M), Enterprise by quote. Prices shown are the annual-billing rateWhere it wins. Excellent developer experience, a well-loved open-source project, and markdown output tuned for token efficiency.
What to watch. The proxy mode decides the price: basic is 1 credit a page, enhanced is 5, and the default is auto, which retries a blocked page on enhanced and bills 5. Credits expire monthly on the self-serve plans and only roll over on Scale and Enterprise.
Bright Data
Web Scraper API billed per record: free tier 5,000 records a month, pay-as-you-go $1.50 per 1,000, Scale $499 a month for 384,000 records then $1.30 per 1,000, Enterprise by quote. You pay only for successful deliveriesWhere it wins. The largest proxy network in the category (150M+ residential IPs across 195 countries) and hundreds of prebuilt domain scrapers and ready-made datasets.
What to watch. It is a broad platform rather than a single LLM-ready endpoint, so output usually needs cleaning before you can embed it, and the pricing surface is complex.
Apify
Free ($5 usage), Starter $29, Scale $199, Business $999, each including that dollar value of usage. Actor compute is billed per compute unit at $0.20 (Free and Starter), $0.16 (Scale) or $0.13 (Business), with proxies charged on topWhere it wins. A marketplace of thousands of prebuilt Actors, so common targets are already solved, plus a full automation and scheduling platform.
What to watch. Costs stack in layers: the plan buys a dollar allowance, Actor compute burns it at $0.13 to $0.20 per compute unit, and residential proxies add $7 to $8 per GB on top. Unused allowance expires monthly, and output is generic JSON rather than LLM-ready markdown.
ScrapingBee
Freelance $49 (250k credits), Startup $99 (1M), Business $249 (3M), Business+ $599 (8M), Custom by quoteWhere it wins. Very easy to adopt, dependable rendering, and a Google Search API bundled into every tier.
What to watch. You mostly get HTML back, so the cleaning, chunking and structuring work for an LLM is still yours to do.
ScraperAPI
Free 1,000 credits a month, Hobby $49 (100k credits), Business $299 (3M credits), Scaling $475 (14M credits), plus Student, Startup, Professional, Advanced and Enterprise tiersWhere it wins. Strong price per request at volume and a very simple drop-in proxy API.
What to watch. It is proxy infrastructure first, so an LLM pipeline still needs its own parsing, boilerplate stripping and schema layer.
ZenRows
Free tier (5,000 credits), Build $16, Launch $57, Growth $165, Scale $456 (5M credits), Enterprise customWhere it wins. Focused on getting through Cloudflare, DataDome and PerimeterX where simpler fetchers fail.
What to watch. Protected requests consume far more credits than plain ones, so the effective price depends heavily on your targets.
Oxylabs
Web Scraper API: Micro $49, Starter $99, Business $999, Custom+ by quote. Proxies are priced separately, residential from $6/GBWhere it wins. Enterprise-grade unblocking, a large global proxy network, and dedicated parsers for major targets, plus a free Custom Parser for your own CSS or XPath rules.
What to watch. The headline result counts are best-case for a single cheap target: Oxylabs own FAQ notes the Micro plan's 98,000 results apply to Amazon, and spreading the same plan across mixed targets works out closer to 16,000 per target. Whole-site crawling means buying a second product.
Crawl4AI
Apache-2.0, no license cost. You pay for your own servers, proxies and engineering timeWhere it wins. No vendor bill at all, full control, deep crawling with BFS, DFS and best-first strategies, and output already shaped for RAG ingestion. It is the most popular open-source crawler in the category, with roughly 72,000 GitHub stars.
What to watch. You own the ops: proxy rotation, browser fleet, retries, blocks and upgrades. Free software is not free infrastructure.
Diffbot
Free 10,000 credits a month, Startup $299 (250k credits), Plus $899 (1M credits), Enterprise customWhere it wins. A pre-built Knowledge Graph of more than 10 billion entities you can query instead of crawling, and computer-vision extraction that classifies and structures pages with no per-site rules to write.
What to watch. The first paid tier is $299 a month and credits are consumed fast (a Knowledge Graph record costs 25 credits, a data-center proxy request doubles the cost), so for plain RAG ingestion it is expensive and heavier than you need.
ScrapeGraphAI
Free 500 credits one-time, Starter $20 (10k credits), Growth $100 (100k), Pro $500 (750k), Enterprise custom. The Python library is MIT licensed and free to self-host.Where it wins. The open-source library (MIT, 28.4k GitHub stars) is a genuine option rather than a demo, it plugs into OpenAI, Groq, Azure, Gemini or a local Ollama model, and the managed API starts at $20 a month, below our own floor.
What to watch. The managed API bills per credit and the rate depends on the endpoint (extract costs 5 credits, stealth adds 5, a crawl adds 2 on top of per-page scrape cost), so cost per page is harder to predict. Self-hosting means you supply the LLM key and pay model tokens on every page.
Want the full field, including Zyte? Read the best web scraping API buyer's guide.
Side by side
Zyte vs ClawEngine, honestly
A fair look at what each does well. Both are capable tools. Here is where they differ.
| What matters | ClawEngine | Zyte |
|---|---|---|
| Anti-bot and unblocking | None; public, permitted pages only, no blocking defeated | Core strength, datacenter and residential proxies included |
| Cost model | Flat monthly plans sized by page volume, $39 to $399 | Per successful request, priced across five site difficulty tiers |
| Forecasting the bill | Same number every month regardless of which sites you crawl | Depends on tier mix; discounts need a $100 to $500 commitment |
| Structured extraction | Any schema you declare, filled from the rendered page | Fixed page types, plus custom attributes on top of one of them |
| Whole-site crawling | Scoped crawl from a seed URL with path rules and a page budget | Request-level API; crawl logic lives in Scrapy or your code |
| Getting started | One POST with a URL and a schema, no framework required | $5 starting credit; best value comes through scrapy-zyte-api |
| Failed requests | Retries handled internally, billed against your plan volume | Not billed at all; you pay only for successful responses |
| Best suited for | Teams who want LLM-ready data without operating a crawler | Python teams crawling defended sites at enterprise scale |
Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each product for the latest.
Why teams pick ClawEngine
One API that turns any website into clean, LLM-ready data
Tiered per-request pricing is fair and still hard to budget
Charging more for a site that fights back is more honest than one flat rate for everything, and Zyte deserves credit for it. The catch is procedural: you cannot fill in the line item for next quarter until you know which tier each target lands in, and that can change when a site adds protection. A flat plan is a worse deal on easy sites and a much easier number to defend in a budget review.
A fixed list of page types is a ceiling you meet suddenly
The automatic extraction in Zyte handles product, article, jobPosting, forumThread and serp shapes well, because those pages have been modeled deliberately. Everything works until the day your target is a county permit record or an insurance rate table, and then you are writing selectors again inside a product you bought to avoid writing selectors. Declaring your own schema removes that cliff entirely.
Unblocking and ingestion are different purchases
If the hard part of your job is getting a response at all, buy unblocking, and Zyte is one of the two or three best places to buy it. If the hard part is that the response is 400KB of HTML nobody can use, buy ingestion. Teams overpay by buying heavy unblocking for public documentation sites, and they under-buy by pointing a clean-data pipeline at a target that blocks it.
People also ask
Zyte alternatives: the questions buyers ask
What is the best Zyte alternative?
It depends which part of Zyte you actually use. If you rely on its unblocking against defended sites, Bright Data and ZenRows are the closest like-for-like swaps. If you use it to turn pages into clean, LLM-ready data, ClawEngine and Firecrawl both do that in fewer moving parts. If you use Scrapy Cloud to host spiders you already wrote, no managed API replaces that directly, because you would be giving up the spiders too.
What is Zyte used for?
Zyte API is a single endpoint that fetches a page through datacenter or residential proxies, optionally renders it in a browser, and can return AI-extracted data for known page types. It grew out of Scrapinghub, the company that created and still maintains Scrapy, so it is most often found underneath Python crawling stacks and inside teams that run spiders at scale.
How much does Zyte API cost?
Zyte bills per successful request, and the rate depends on the target site. Its documentation assigns every request to one of five tiers for HTTP and five for browser requests, so an easy site and a defended one cost very different amounts. Volume discounts come from a monthly commitment: 25 percent at $100, 40 percent at $200, 48 percent at $350 and 52 percent at $500. New standard accounts get $5 of free credit, enterprise accounts $200.
Does Zyte have a free plan?
Not a recurring one. Zyte gives new standard accounts $5 of initial credit and enterprise accounts $200, which is enough to test against your real targets before committing. After that you pay per successful request. Rate-limited and failed responses are not billed, which is a genuinely fair detail and one of the better parts of their pricing model.
Does Zyte extract structured data?
Yes, for page types it already knows. Automatic extraction covers article, articleList, articleNavigation, forumThread, jobPosting, jobPostingNavigation, pageContent, product, productList, productNavigation and serp. You can add custom attributes on top with an LLM-based schema, but a standard type still has to be requested alongside it. If your target is a page shape that is not on that list, you are back to writing selectors.
Good questions
Zyte vs ClawEngine, answered
More comparisons
See how ClawEngine compares
Firecrawl alternative
Crawl, render JS and extract typed fields in one call, with compliance-first defaults.
vs ApifyApify alternative
Skip the actor marketplace: one API returns LLM-ready markdown and typed JSON.
vs Bright DataBright Data alternative
LLM-ready output and one simple API, instead of running your own proxy stack.
vs ScrapingBeeScrapingBee alternative
More than raw HTML: crawl plus typed extraction and LLM-ready markdown in one call.
vs ScraperAPIScraperAPI alternative
Past the proxy layer: crawl, render and typed extraction that returns LLM-ready data.
vs ZenRowsZenRows alternative
Beyond unblocking: crawl, render and typed extraction that returns LLM-ready data.
vs OxylabsOxylabs alternative
Enterprise unblocking is not the same as LLM-ready data. Crawl, render and extract in one call.
vs Crawl4AICrawl4AI alternative
Free to license, not free to run. The managed alternative when ops time costs more than the bill.
vs DiffbotDiffbot alternative
A lighter, lower-cost managed API when you need clean page data for RAG, not a 10-billion-entity Knowledge Graph.
vs ScrapeGraphAIScrapeGraphAI alternative
Predictable per-page cost and typed schema extraction, with no LLM key to supply and no token bill per page.
vs ScrapyScrapy alternative
Rendering, retries and typed extraction as a managed call, with no spiders or browser fleet to operate.
vs BrowserbaseBrowserbase alternative
When you need pages read at volume rather than a browser session driven step by step.
vs ExaExa alternative
For teams who already know which sites they need and want the whole site crawled, not semantically searched.
vs TavilyTavily alternative
For teams past the prototype: scoped crawls, page budgets and typed fields pulled from the rendered page.
vs Jina ReaderJina Reader alternative
Whole-site crawling and typed schema extraction, for teams who have outgrown reading one URL at a time.
Turn any website into clean, LLM-ready data
One API: a URL in, clean markdown or typed JSON out. ClawEngine crawls, renders JavaScript and extracts typed structured fields in a single call, ready to embed for your RAG pipelines and AI agents.
LLM-ready output · one API call · public, permitted data only · robots.txt respected